Many thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with an eARC of After World in exchange for my honest review!
What a somber, daunting, bleak, optimistic, and thought-provoking journey this turned out to be. Sometimes, it sinks me into pessimism because of how grimly it depicts humanity’s extinction and all the futility it ran into while trying to save itself. Other times, it lifts my spirit with a hopeful attitude as it shows Earth rewilding itself in the absence of us tiny mortals. Whatever’s happening, I’m always enthralled by this sci-fi post-apocalyptic that presents such a fascinating dynamic between Sen and the storyworker AI, that makes them feel like living and breathing characters, that weaves in meta layers to poke fun at the popular tropes of dystopian and post-apocalyptic tales, and that further deploys these meta facets to blur our perception of what’s truly happening in this narrative that we’re viewing through the AI’s increasingly skewed POV. Now, I can understand why this last aspect becomes confusing for some readers, but personally, I’m able to vibe with it, particularly in regard to its thematic coverage of the desire to tell stories the way we want them to go, even if they don’t align with reality.
Another element that I can understand jarring some people is all the technical detail in this novel. Passages from fictional books, dictionary segments to reveal new words that humans created in this terrifying period and to show us which words got booted out of our vocabulary, and computer coding comprise a few of those details. I very much enjoy the nuance they add to this setting, but if you think it’s too tedious of an attempt at worldbuilding, I get that. As for the ending, it goes for a path that leaves me somewhat sad, but there are some rays of light that shine from it, too—an appropriate conclusion that clicks with the rest of the book.
Overall, I highly recommend picking up After World by Debbie Urbanski. If I’d read it last year, I’m certain I would have found room to squeeze it onto my list of my top ten books of 2023. I’m eager to explore more of Urbanski’s work.
Windup score: 88/100
2 Cents Critic 